New Delhi, January 29: Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday tabled the Economic Survey 2017-18 in the Lok Sabha soon after President Ram Nath Kovind's address to the joint sitting of both Houses of Parliament. A series of major reforms undertaken over the past year will allow real GDP growth to reach 6.75 percent this fiscal and will rise to 7.0 to 7.5 percent in 2018-19, thereby re-instating India as the world’s fastest-growing major economy, the Economic Survey 2017-18 said. It further stated that the reform measures undertaken in 2017-18 can be strengthened further in 2018-19.

The Economic Survey is an annual document of the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, and reviews the developments in the Indian economy over the previous 12 months. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan directed the finance minister to table a copy of the Hindi and English versions of the Economic Survey 2017-18.

The Economic Survey presented by the Jaitley in Parliament today has relied upon analysis of the new data to highlight ten new economic facts; here are the key Highlights of the Economic Survey 2017-18:

  1. Goods and Services Tax (GST) has given a new perceptive of the Indian economy and new data has emerged. There has been a fifty percent increase in the number of indirect taxpayers. There has also been a large increase in voluntary registrations, especially by small enterprises that buy from large enterprises wanting to avail themselves of input tax credits. The Economic Survey also stated that fears of major producing states that the shift to the new system would undermine their tax collections have been allayed as the distribution of the GST base among the states got closely linked to the size of their economies. Similarly, there has been an addition of about 18 lakh in individual income tax filers since November 2016.

  2. India’s formal sector, especially formal non-farm payroll, is substantially greater than what it currently is believed to be. It became evident that when “formality” was defined in terms of social security provisions like EPFO/ESIC the formal sector payroll was found to be about 31 percent of the non-agricultural work force. When “formality” was defined in terms of being part of the GST net, such formal sector payroll share was found to be 53 percent.

  3. For the first time in India’s history, data on the international exports of states has been dwelt in the Economic Survey.  Such data indicates a strong correlation between export performance and states’ standard of living.  States that export internationally and trade with other states were found to be richer.  Such correlation is stronger between prosperity and international trade.

  4. India’s exports are unusual in that the largest firms account for a much smaller share of exports than in other comparable countries. Top one percent of Indian firms account only for 38% of exports unlike in other countries where they account for substantially greater share – (72, 68, 67 and 55 percent in Brazil, Germany, Mexico and USA respectively). Such tendencies were also found to be true for the top five or ten per cent of the Indian companies.

  5. It was pointed out that the Rebate of State Levies (ROSL) has increased exports of ready-made garments (man-made fibers) by about 16 per cent but not of others.

  6. The data highlighted another seemingly known fact that Indian society exhibits a strong desire for a male child. It pointed out that most parents continued to have children until they get number of sons.  The survey gave details of various scenarios leading to skewed sex ratios and also gave a comparison on sex ratio by birth between India and Indonesia.

  7. The survey pointed out that tax departments in India have gone in for contesting against in several tax disputes but also with a low success rate which is below 30 per cent. About 66 per cent of pending cases accounted for only 1.8 per cent of value at stake. It further stated that 0.2 per cent of cases accounted for 56 per cent of the value at stake.

  8. Extrapolating the data the survey indicated that growth in savings did not bring economic growth but the growth in investment did.

  9. The survey mentions that collections of direct taxes by Indian states and other local governments, where they have powers to collect them is significantly lower than their counterparts in other federal countries. A comparison has been given between ratios of direct tax to total revenues of local governments in India, Brazil and Germany.

  10. The survey captures the footprints of climate change on the Indian territory and consequent adverse impact on agricultural yields. Extreme temperature increases and deficiency in rainfall have been captured on the Indian map and the graphical changes in agricultural yields are brought out from such data.  The impact was found to be twice as large in un-irrigated areas as in irrigated ones.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Ministers, Deputy Speaker M Thambidurai, opposition leaders Mallikarjun Kharge, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Sudip Bandopadhyay and Farooq Abdullah were among others present in the House. The House is scheduled to meet on February 1 when the general budget for 2018-19 will be presented by the finance minister.

According to the Survey, Rs 20,339 crore has been approved by the Government in 2017-18 to meet various obligations arising from interest subvention being provided to the farmers on short term crop loans, as also loans on post-harvest storages meets an important input requirement of the farmers in the country, especially small and marginal farmers who are the major borrowers. This was stated in the Economic Survey 2017-18 tabled by the Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs, Shri Arun Jaitley in the Parliament today.

The Survey further adds that this institutional credit will help in delinking the farmers from non-institutional sources of credit, where they are compelled to borrow at usurious rates of interest. Since the crop insurance under Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) is linked to availing of crop loans, the farmers would stand to benefit from both farmer oriented initiatives of the Government, by accessing the crop loans.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 29, 2018 02:56 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).